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Brimming with civic virtue, I strolled home from the polling place. That satisfied Election-Day feeling generally lasts until the results begin to come in. But I was barely home Tuesday before I felt as though I had wasted my time.
People sometimes say that one vote doesn't make any
difference.
For more than a decade, I've lived in
remote places where elections have been decided by a vote
or two. Besides that, if one vote isn't significant, then
why did so many candidates, each a Republican touting his
fiscal prudence, spend all that money mailing me their
resumes with pictures of their families?
A single vote might make the difference. What's bothersome is that it won't make any difference which candidates win.
For instance, every time that Americans got a chance to
vote on the Vietnam War, we voted against it. In 1964,
Barry Goldwater talked about sending in troops and bombing
Hanoi. Lyndon Johnson spoke for peace: We are not about
to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from
home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for
themselves.
There can be and will be, as long as I
am President, peace for all Americans.
Of course Johnson won. My friends' older brothers began
to be sent nine or ten thousand miles to fight an Asian
war. In 1968, Richard Nixon said he had a plan to end the
war within a year. He was elected. Four years later, as
guys I went to school with continued to return in
wheelchairs or body bags, Nixon said peace is at
hand,
and got another term.
No matter how often Americans chose candidates who were going to end the war, the war continued until Gerald Ford, an unelected President who hadn't made any such promises, finally ended it.
We can look to more recent history to see the same process. If you voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980, you were voting for an increased federal deficit and an increased governmental role in private matters. It's certainly no mystery why Ronald Reagan took the oath of office the next January. Now the government would be off our backs and the deficit would be cut.
Through 191 years that included two world wars, uncounted financial panics, the settling of a continent and a major depression, the national deficit had swollen to $914.3 billion on Sept. 30, 1980. In six peaceful Reagan years, the debt has reached $1,841.1 billion. The President who vowed to reduce the deficit has added more to it than all 39 of his predecessors, combined.
Reagan's idea of a government that is off our backs is a government that snoops in our bedrooms, controls women's bodies and declares which magazines are acceptable reading.
Closer to home, when we elected a governor in 1974, there was a clear choice between Dick Lamm and John Vanderhoof. Elect Vanderhoof, and unbridled growth would continue along the Front Range, with choking clouds of air pollution and rampant development of the remaining open space. Mountain highways would be lined with fast-food joints and particle-board condos would spread through the subdivided valleys. Rivers would be polluted by mine waste as toxic chemicals wafted across the state.
Nobody wanted that, so we elected Dick Lamm. But I defy anyone to point out how we'd be any worse off if we had turned the statehouse over to the Colorado Mining Congress, the Colorado Association of Homebuilders and the Colorado Association for Commerce and Industry.
Depressing as such thoughts are, they have made it simpler for me to decide whom to favor in November.
I'm looking for a candidate who promotes urban sprawl, suburban engorgement and rural decay. He advocates gargantuan reservoirs. He favors outright subsidies, not just a few tax breaks, for new low-wage industries. He believes that it is more cost-effective to import people for the good jobs than it is to spend money on educating Coloradans to be able to hold those jobs.
Even though I'd have to agree with his opponent, I want to see that candidate elected. If experience is any guide, then we'll get the precise opposite of everything he says he stands for.
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